In Defense of Football

The tang of fall is in the air, and every American knows what it portends: the sights and sounds of cleats digging into grass turf, of grunting linemen colliding shoulder pad to shoulder pad, of an oblong leather ball spinning through the air, high above the mortals below. Football season is almost upon us, and with it comes another season of controversy, prompting fresh claims of a crisis in the game.

College football is perturbed by news that Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel, the first freshman ever to win the Heisman Trophy, may be suspended for accepting autograph payments. The National Football League is buzzing over the arrest of cashiered New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez on murder charges.

And both the college and professional ranks—along with Pop Warner and high school play—continue to be roiled by reports that football is too dangerous to countenance. Though there have been lawsuits and complaints about deaths caused by overheating and freak injuries such as broken necks, the bulk of the recent criticism focuses on the impact of repeated hits to the head. Even blows that don't result in concussions are now linked to the onset, years later, of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that can result in mood disorders and dementia. It has been cited as a contributing factor in the suicides of the former NFL stars Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, Andre Waters and Ray Easterling, and of the former Ivy League lineman Owen Thomas.

Wanting to protect youngsters, a few school boards are discussing banning football, while many parents are saying they do not want their children to play the game. President Barack Obama spoke for many when he said, "I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you, if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football."

Declining numbers of young players eventually could threaten the recruiting pipeline for college programs and the NFL, but a more immediate threat comes from a lawsuit, filed by a group of 4,000 former NFL payers, seeking damages from the league. A group of former college athletes has followed suit, charging the National Collegiate Athletic Association with negligence in its handling of concussions in football and other sports. If successful, this litigation has the potential to cost big-time football as much money—and to stigmatize it as much—as earlier class-action suits did to the makers of cigarettes and silicone-breast implants.

Already the influential writer Malcolm Gladwell has called for colleges to cancel their football programs. Such recommendations may seem outlandish today but, as Mr. Gladwell notes, dogfighting—which he believes to be just as barbaric as football—was once a popular pastime too. Today, of course, it is outlawed. Should football go the same way?

Hardly. The case for continuing to watch, celebrate and participate in what has become the de facto national pastime—football long ago displaced baseball as America's most popular sport—remains strong. For 1.1 million players in high school and about 2.8 million players in youth leagues, football can provide an invaluable lesson in team effort, hard work and discipline, along with a sense of camaraderie that can last a lifetime. (New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin notes that he still has a "tremendous bond" with his teammates from a championship high-school team a half-century ago.) For 32,000 young men who attend college on football scholarships (out of a total of 68,000 college players), football also provides a way to get an education—and not only in Xs and Os—that might not otherwise be available to them.

And, of course, for the 1,696 players who will be on the NFL's opening day rosters, the game delivers fabulous riches: Their average annual salary is $1.9 million, ample compensation for sustaining some hard hits, even if the average NFL career lasts only 3½ years. Few begrudge the players their rich paychecks for competing in a physically and mentally demanding contest, played out before millions of engaged viewers. This is competition—and capitalism—at its finest, and its benefits extend far beyond the participants.

From its 19th-century origins as a sport played in a few Northeastern prep schools and colleges, football has spread to every corner of the country. As I discovered on a trip to Alaska, even Barrow, the northernmost city in the country, has a high-school football field, albeit one covered by snow most of the year.

For spectators, rooting for a high-school, college or professional football team can bring a strong sense of belonging. Football allegiances have the power to bring together such otherwise disparate parts of American society as white collar and blue collar, African-American and Caucasian, Latino and Asian, gay and straight; they unite Southerner and Northerner, Easterner and Westerner, city slicker and country bumpkin. And though football can be a violent sport, those who watch it are, on the whole, peaceable and tolerant—especially as compared with foreign fans of soccer ("football" to the rest of the world), who make up for the relative lack of violence on the field with melees in the stands.

Football, in short, provides the U.S. with a kind of civic religion, culminating each year in the fervent observance of the rites of the Super Bowl. Yet worshipers at the church of the sacred gridiron—among whom I count myself, having been a fan of the University of California Golden Bears and the San Francisco 49ers for as long as I can remember—cannot be blind to legitimate criticisms of the game they love. The hazards of competition are real, and our knowledge of them is growing because of advancing, if still incomplete, medical research.

ENLARGE

Football has become America's de facto national pastime. The Stanford Cardinal sideline cheers after an interception in the Rose Bowl game on Jan. 1.
Getty Images

Players in the Game

Youth football: 2.8 million

High school: 1.1 million

College: 68,000

A 2012 study in the journal Neurology, which surveyed the autopsies of 334 deceased NFL players, found that they were three times more likely than the general population to suffer from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and ALS ( Lou Gehrig's disease). The disease known as CTE was found by Boston University researchers among 50 former football players, including 33 NFL veterans. Less alarming but still concerning is a 2007 study of 2,500 retired NFL players by the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, which found that those who had at least three concussions were at triple the risk of getting clinical depression as those with no concussions.

Most worrisome from the point of view of parents is evidence that the health dangers extend to young players who will never become professional athletes. Boston University researchers have uncovered signs of CTE among six young men who played football in high school but not in college or the pros.

Even those young players who do not develop CTE are at risk from repeated concussions, especially if they occur close together. Researchers at Virginia Tech have concluded that players, even some as young as 7 or 8, routinely receive blows to the head with an average force of 40G's—similar to a boxer's gloved punch. The most severe hits have been recorded at 120G's—equivalent to a car crash. Purdue researchers have found evidence of neurological impairment even among high-school players who have not had concussions.

But it would be grotesquely misleading to suggest that the average football player is likely to be consigned to dementia and early death. Scientists at the University of Montreal tracked a group of middle-aged men who had played contact sports in college 30 years before and sustained concussions while doing so. According to a 2012 study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, the researchers found no evidence of cognitive impairment beyond the effects of "normal aging."

Presumably there is even less impairment among the vast majority of football players who never compete at the college level. Indeed, a 2002 study by Mayo Clinic researchers, who surveyed 915 football players between the ages of 9 and 13, found that injuries were relatively rare and, when they did occur, were mild, the most common being contusions (i.e., bruises).

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, meanwhile, surveyed 3,439 men who played in the NFL for at least five seasons between 1959 and 1988, and found that they actually live longer than the general population. Not surprisingly, the biggest health problems were found among the largest players—they were at elevated risk of heart disease. Claims that NFL players suffer a suicide rate of six times the national average have circulated widely on the Internet, but they have no foundation in fact.

The evidence, in sum, while admittedly incomplete, suggests that football is risky but not fantastically so—especially when compared with many other popular sports and pastimes.

Between 2002 and 2012, according to the University of North Carolina Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, there were an average of 3.8 fatalities a year directly attributable to football, fewer than for weight lifting (an average of 6.3 fatalities a year) or even amusement park rides (4.4 fatalities a year). Mountain climbing produces more fatalities—an average of 25 a year. So does horseback riding, with more than 100 deaths a year, to say nothing of bicycle riding, which killed 677 people in 2011 alone, and swimming, which kills more than 3,500 people a year. (Granted, more people ride horses or go swimming than play football, but football players typically spend more time on their sport than casual hobbyists spend on theirs.)

Simply being outside produces more deaths than playing football. In 2012, 28 Americans died in lightning strikes. Driving is even more deadly. Given that almost 35,000 Americans died in 2009 in motor vehicle accidents, a football player is far more likely to die on his way to a game or practice than on the field itself.

Not all sports injuries result in death, of course. And, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, football does produce more minor injuries—sprained knees, bruised thighs, and the like—than most other sports (although fewer than basketball). But football produces roughly as many serious injuries resulting in hospitalization or death as does swimming or horseback riding and a lot fewer than bicycling, exercising with fitness equipment or driving all-terrain vehicles, mopeds and minibikes. The last category produces almost three times as many serious injuries annually as football, but it receives far less public scrutiny.

The guiding principle with football should be "mend it, don't end it." And, in fact, the process of mending the game has been going on for a very long time.

Football was once a lot more violent than it is today. In 1905 alone there were 18 deaths on the gridiron. President Theodore Roosevelt responded by convening a summit of football coaches at the White House, thereby setting in motion changes in the rules, such as the introduction of the forward pass and the leather helmet, which made the sport safer.

With players getting bigger and stronger, deaths spiked again in the 1960s—36 players perished in 1968 alone. Alarms were sounded, and yet another safety revolution occurred, in 1976, when rules were introduced to ban tackling headfirst. This helped the fatality rate fall to 10 deaths in 1977 and even lower thereafter.

More recently, with increased attention to head injuries, the NFL and college programs have been introducing rule changes to prohibit players from returning to a game or practice if they have sustained a concussion. The NFL, under prodding from the players union, also has been limiting physical contact in practice, once a major source of injury. Brutal "two-a-day" hitting sessions during training camp are now a thing of the past in the pros; teams only practice once a day and generally save tackling for the actual games. Moreover, coaches once used to restrict water at training camps to "toughen up" players. Today, by contrast, hydration is plentiful, thereby reducing another major source of harm.

There is room for more safety innovation, such as mandating the use of advanced helmets with extra padding to prevent concussions and imposing more limitations on kickoffs, when "special teams" players rush at each other at full speed—one of the most dangerous parts of the game.

Parents, for their part, should give serious consideration to the advice of Dr. Robert Cantu, a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University School of Medicine, who believes that boys should not take part in tackle football before age 14, because developing brains are especially vulnerable to hard blows. Playing touch football until then can still teach the basics of the game and allow boys to excel later, as Tom Brady's example demonstrates. The future Hall of Fame quarterback did not play tackle football until his freshman year in high school.

But let's not overreact to a handful of tragic injuries and legislate or litigate away a game that means so much to so many Americans. Teddy Roosevelt, the president who "saved" football in an earlier era, warned that abolishing the game would result in turning out "mollycoddles instead of vigorous men." "It is to my mind simple nonsense, a mere confession of weakness," he thundered in 1907, "to desire to abolish a game because tendencies show themselves, or practices grow up, which prove the game ought to be reformed."

TR was right, and the "simple nonsense" hasn't gotten any more persuasive in the intervening century, no matter how many medical studies are cited to support it.

Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present" (Liveright, 2013).

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